Caml is a dialect of the ML programming language family, developed at INRIA and formerly at ENS.
Like many descendants of ML, Caml is statically typed, strictly evaluated, and uses automatic memory management.
The first Caml implementation in Lisp was nicknamed "Heavy CAML" because of its memory and CPU requirements relative to its successor Caml Light that was implemented in C by Xavier Leroy and Damien Doligez. In addition to a complete rewriting, CAML Special Light added a powerful module system to the core language.
Currently, the main implementation of Caml is OCaml, which adds many new features to the language including an object layer.